Mark Lyndersay

Mark Lyndersay has taken time out of his very hectic schedule to answer a few questions for us here at TechTing.net. Mr. Lyndersay has been writing about technology on an almost constant basis since 1995 (I’ve been reading him since about that time), being published in the Trinidad Guardian and Trinidad Express newspapers. His musings, as well as much of his photographic work can be found at his website. Read on for a peak into the mind of Mark Lyndersay.

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TechTing.net has recently had the opportunity of sitting down to chat with Ms. Bernadette Lewis, Secretary General of the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU). This was my first time meeting her, so there was a bit of apprehension at the prospect of conducting an interview with her. It turned out that my fears were unfounded as she happened to be a very welcoming and accommodating host and was the master of her domain. An interview full of fluff and low on substance this is not. The following is  a summary of what was discussed.

The CTU was established in 1989 by heads of Caribbean governments to be the policy institution for telecommunications development in the region. It is an organ of CARICOM. At the time, governments in the region realized that telecommunications would have a significant role to play in the development of the individual nations and of the region as a whole. Some of the primary activities of the CTU were:

1. To assist in policy formulation for the telecom sector
2. To help in the mitigation of interference challenges within the region between countries on the use of radio frequency spectrum
3. To educate and to help build capacity in telecommunications within the region.

Ms. Bernadette Lewis - Secretary General

Because of the intergovernmental nature and their work in policy generation, the CTU has not had much exposure to the man on the street. This would explain why myself and just about every other professional that I know had not been aware of the CTU until recently. The CTU does recognize that the whole telecommunications industry has changed since the inception of the CTU in 1989. The world has changed fundamentally and radically in a fairly short time due to the convergence of information technologies and communication technologies into what we now know as ICT (Information and Communication Technology). The CTU is funded  by it’s member states as well as through donor funding from it’s strategic partners.

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New looks for Profiles, Pages and now Likes. Facebook is no stranger to change and almost every user-visible update has been met by angry protests from a large cross-section of it’s users. Facebook may be at danger of alienating many of those who helped it rise to success.

Let’s take the example of the poorly handled changes to fan Pages over the last few months. First, there was the malfunctioning  of the “Suggest to friends” feature on Pages. It disappeared for non-admin Page visitors. Facebook initially said that it was removed due to a bug. Then, the functionality was restored for Page admins, but it was now officially unavailable for regular Page visitors. This wasn’t too bad in itself, considering that it probably should be the Page admin’s responsibility to market their own pages. The thing is that while the functionality appeared to be present, invitations are not actually sent. This bad behaviour persists even with the release of the new Pages layout. Trawling the internet tells me that man other persons are having the same problem. However, Facebook has clearly assigned a low priority to this issue. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Why fix it when you can force Page admins to purchase Facebook Ads to promote their properties?

Then there’s the actual layout of the new Pages layout. From a Page admin’s point of view, there are two large changes which must be causing some consternation. The first is the expansion of the right column to make way for larger ads. This does of course make the middle column (the one where the actual content, info and feeds live) narrower. Secondly, Static FBML is about to die (March 11, 2011). The big deal about this is that while FBML is quite limited in it’s capabilities on Pages, it is also quite simple to use. It made the creation of custom and default landing tabs a fairly simple affair. With this gone, Page admins will have to learn how to utilize IFRAMEs. Simple enough, perhaps, except that this means that admins will have to be verse in the arts of HTML and configuring web servers. While this will not slow me down, it essentially removes access to the casual do-it-yourself types. There may be technical and financial merits to these changes but consider that non-profit organizations and charities that have used Facebook for marketing may now have to pay up for Facebook ads and for Page customization services.

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The Cloud may strike you as a fairly new buzzword, but the truth is that the cloud has been around for many years. Even more surprising to you may be the realization that you have been using the cloud for a very long time without having been aware of it.

The Cloud – What is it?

The Cloud refers to the storage and processing of data and application on servers or computers which reside on the internet and not on servers which are in the same geographical location as the user. These servers can be located any where in the world, and it is this dispersed nature that leads to it being described as a “cloud”; your data is up and out there… somewhere. The cloud is quite distinct from the traditional computing paradigm of local processing and storage; YOUR stuff on YOUR computer.

For the sake of completeness, here is the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) specific definition:

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

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Chances are that you’ve noticed that every major smartphone manufacturer has announced, or that rumours abound of, plans to implement Near Field Communication (NFC) technology on their devices. While NFC may seem like a new thing to those of us in the West, the truth is that it has been around for quite a while in markets such as the EU and Japan. But what is it?

NFC is a short range wireless technology which, unlike other wireless technologies like Bluetooth and WiFi which rely on direct radio transmissions, depends on the interaction of electromagnetic radio fields. Two NFC-equipped devices can sync or exchange data with each other when held nearby or bumped. NFC devices must have close proximity for connections to be made; while the standard allows for up to a 20cm range, the reality is that most low power devices have a range of 4cm. Near Field Communication operates on the 13.56MHz frequency band.

Of the two devices making a NFC connection, at least one of them must be an active “reader” device and the other a passive device which can be thought of as a tag (as in RFID tag). When the tag comes within range of the reader device, the RF field generated flows through the antennae of the passive tag and provides power to the tag, thereby activating it.

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2011 may go down as The Year of the Tablet. Every major electronics manufacturer and their corporate mother will be releasing some form of tablet form factor portable device. Some will win, and some will lose, but the real loser will be the netbook. The netbook is a class of computer that I love to hate. Netbooks are underpowered and provide a less than ideal value proposition. The tiny keyboards are a total mess to type on and the reliance on the trackpad/mouse for navigation is less than perfect. Netbooks sold (and sold well) for a number of reasons:

• They were considerably cheaper than full blown laptops, with pricing around the US$300 mark.
• They had just about enough processing power to handle basic tasks like Facebooking and Skyping.
• They had pretty good battery life.
• They are light.
• They were considerably cheaper than full blown laptops, with pricing around the US$300 mark.

My main objection to netbooks was that I simply could not see their value proposition. For a couple hundred dollars more, you could have a REAL notebook computer, with a REAL keyboard and a REAL screen that didn’t require you to squint while you scanned your Facebook news feed. I advised many against the purchase of netbooks; “wait a couple months and save the extra money for a real thing,” I’d tell them. Thankfully, they were all obedient and were not among the many that told me harrowing tales of netbook buyer’s remorse.

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